The game was extremely well written in my opinion, the gunplay was good, sneaking worked and combat reasonably executed. As a result, the linear parts worked well, but it has a smattering of rough open world mechanics tacked on, just enough to draw comparisons to gta (which are all very unfavorable), and many rough edges around core gameplay things like vehicle driving, enemy ai, and scripted events triggering out of order / not triggering at all. And that's assuming you are playing on pc, and not a console brought to it's knees every hour.

My diagnosis is that it feels designed by committee with no one willing to make deep cuts, and as a result suffered from trying to be everything ever marketed to everyone, and ended shipping all the ideas both late and unfinished. They seemingly had no time to polish the core of the game because it was too big.

And let's not forget about the outright lies in all the marketing videos. CDPR promised many features which are nowhere to be seen, even on videos that were released weeks before the final release date.

Can you give some examples? I'm half way through act 2 and I didn't find anything exceptional.

What I did find is a lot of gameplay time padding. Wait for this or that to call you (instead of going on with the mission). And you can not actually wait, have to do other missions. Go through this interminable chat with an npc where you are being given options that don't alter at all the end state (that milltech lady for example). Have this unsinkable part where you find out all kinds of crap about a character that you met 20 mins before and most likely not going to meet again. Not to mention he tried to kill the protagonist in 2 of the pre(?)-prologues. Why did the fat fixer have to die? Why doesn't every vet that panhandles have a story about the wars? I would love to stay a while and listen...

I didn't play enough Witcher to see if they have the same kind of issues, but I am ready to bet most of the success of that series was caused by the content they had to work with, produced by a real writer. I can't stop to wonder if there wasn't a better idea to not get Keanu involved and use that money to hire a bunch of sf writers. Is like GoT (the tv series), while they had content to rely on, all was good. Then we got Season 8...

You can just wait 24 hours instantly in the menu to get npcs to call you back. It was a narrative technique that I think balanced a sense of urgency while letting the player control which thread they want to pull on next, not meant to pad out the game. But I'd agree that the wait function in the main menu could have been introduced in a tutorial (As could most of the games systems)

The padding comes from the random events (Like assaults or robberies) that have no story, you just show up and start shooting (but don't hit any innocents, or the cops will suddenly show up, despite being too busy to show up when the bad guys shoot them).

Are you really surprised "the fat fixer" gets what's coming to him? He dies to show you how ruthless the corps are. He was already dead when the heist went south, and he knew it.

The character of Alt and the Johnny redemption arc was great for me. If you choose the right dialogue options Johnny basically realizes how being pure concentrated 80's sci fi action hero has made him toxic to everyone around him.

I actually appreciate that in this game. Nothing quite like open world games with incredibly high stakes where the narrative demands immediacy, but you want to mess around with side quests for a while. This gives you a chance to explore the world while remaining "in character".

What are you on about? If I don't want to progress on the main story line, I can choose NOT to start the relevant mission. If I started it, I want to go on with it, NOT to wait for 24 hours. Not to mention that main story missions that consist in driving somewhere, going through a badly written dialog tree, just so you can wait to do it all over again is BAD WRITING. You want a good example of balancing the urgency of the main story, yet still allowing to explore the world? Fallout 3. All the beggars you meet demand water, the main goal is to sort out Project Purity, bring water to the wasteland. No forcing the player to progress in the main mission, no waiting, no nonsense. In short, good writing.

Here is another example of this wait bullshit simply padding the gameplay duration: the racing missions. Have to text Claire, then wait, then call her, then go to the place (far away from a quick travel point), then wait some more, than waste time staring at nothing because some npc wants "to get into my head", but misses the queue marked by the dialog option expiring and keeps at it for another minute or so. And to top it off, have the game crash twice in a row before gate 25. This was the second race and in a tragi-comic moment, the whole text-then-wait-than-chat-then-wait happened while Clair was right next to me, after finishing the first mission.

> The padding comes from the random events (Like assaults or robberies) that have no story

No, I can chose to ignore those events, they are not in my way to finish the game. All the wait shenanigans is.

> Are you really surprised "the fat fixer" gets what's coming to him?

What's coming to him? Did we play the same game? He was more than correct in his dealings with V, he got them the best transport option and the "killing of V" comes at the end, when he though that might save him. And his death doesn't help anyone and definitely does not prove "how ruthless the corps are", since Takamura is NOT part of a corp anymore and he had all the reasons in the world to keep around "the best fixer in NC". The fixers death doesn't serve the story at all. Heck, keeping him around as an unwilling partner to V and have them work together to survive would made a better story than shoehorning a best friends ever thing between V and Welles, which failed badly. Ffs, the dude tried to undercut V for 2 of the story lines and a crappy montage doesn't change that.

> The character of Alt

Didn't get there yet.

> the Johnny redemption arc

The dude detonated a nuclear bomb in the middle of a city. There can't possible BE a redemption arc from that.

I hope Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't mean nobody else will put out a cyberpunk themed game. Imagine if this game was made by Obsidian.

That's pretty diegetic though: in the real world you wouldn't expect everything to be placed right next to each other or that things would happen immediately after without time to research/track down leads/prepare/sleep on it/whatever.

The game tries to make up for it by offering outs: The skip time button prominently in the menu. The Wait Zones immediately outside most mission start locations which skip immediately forward to start the mission. (It took a bit to get used to finding these, there probably should have been a tutorial for it: they have a clock icon for their interaction and usually are chairs/benches to sit on or walls to lean on nearby to where the objective marker is. But they existed for every mission I encountered after learning to look for them.) Even the fast travel is something that is easy to overlook. As much as I enjoyed driving, the game was much better realizing that Fast Travel and walking/sprinting everywhere was generally faster and way more convenient than driving anywhere. (Which is an almost an ironic statement of the importance of public transportation in an urban environment.)

I mean, that’s really on them, isn’t it? It’s just a game. I don’t understand why people invest so much of themselves in something they have no control over or personal stake in (aside from maybe paying some preorder money?).

((As an aside: who preorders digital products????))

I feel like consumers really need to reassess their relationship with these big companies. We still seem so naive and overly susceptible to marketing strategies. Superficially people seem to be more cynical than ever, but we keep falling for this BS that is sold to us. What’s going on?

I think video gamers have accumulated a lot of learned helplessness. We're supposed to believe that matchmaking, clients like Steam, Origin, Galaxy are about convenience for the user. It's actually about control. You can only play the game in the way they want. The system decides who you play with. You can't modify it unless you're explicitly given modding tools or map editor. Even playable demos are long gone. Most publishers don't do that because it cuts away the stream of DLC. In the end video gamers are stuck pleading to the publisher or developer because they have nothing left. With board games, making a mod is as simple as saying "let's make a house rule: (...)". Board gamers own their games. Once copy can be used with all your friends.

How can you assert all the things you said if you didn't play the game?

I haven't played it either, but it's honestly difficult to get an idea, because I feel there's so many people complaining that didn't even play it.